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Posts Tagged ‘unified communications’

Yesterday morning in New York and Munich, the company formerly known as Siemens Enterprise Communications unveiled its new logo, tag line and new vision. The new name is “Unify,” and you can see the logo on the website. The tag line for the company is “Harmonize Your Enterprise.” The colors for the company have changed as well. The all-caps blue Siemens logo has been replaced with a much more current logo with the “I” rendered in almost a glowing green color. Siemens Enterprise made some news earlier this year when it sold the networking division, Enterasys, to Extreme networks, meaning Unify will focus exclusively on unified communications and collaboration.

The anchor product of Unfiy is something called “Ansible,” which the company announced earlier this year and goes into beta in early 2014 and general availability by mid-year. Ansible is designed to be a flexible communications “fabric” (or “canvas,” as it’s been called) where users can collaborate better. This may look like one of the many, almost too many, “unified communication” platforms out there, but Ansible is significantly different that most of them.

Oracle World 2013 finished up a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve had a bit of time to reflect on the event. On the Wednesday of the event I spoke at a luncheon hosted by the former Acme Packet Group, which was acquired by Oracle earlier this year. I hadn’t been to Oracle World in a number of years and I wasn’t sure what to expect given the fact that historically Oracle and communications went together about as well as Larry Ellison and Bill Gates.

However, things are changing and everyone is jockeying to move into other markets. That’s why Cisco sells servers and HP sells networking gear. Since Ellison chose to go watch his ship race rather than show up to his own keynote, I have no idea whether he was going to mention communications or not, but make no mistake, Oracle has moved into communications and is here to stay.

Much of the focus of the Acme Packet lunch was on SIP trunking, which was highlighted by a large customer of theirs that had recently migrated the company to all SIP trunks and talked about some of the best practices regarding the migration.

Despite the numerous advancements in Unified Communications (UC) over the past few years, managing UC remains a challenge for many organizations, particularly large enterprises and service providers. Deployments in these environments can be quite complex, as the number of systems and interdependencies between them can overwhelm even the best and most knowledgeable network manager.

Managing a legacy PBX used to be relatively simple since the system was a vertically integrated solution that masked the complexity from the administrator. Today’s systems are comprised of physical servers, virtual servers, desktops, laptops, IP phones, software-based clients that can run on wired, cellular or Wi-Fi networks and now expand out to the cloud. Because of this diversity, no two UC environments are the same, so building an all-encompassing UC management tool can be just as or more complex as the environment itself. A general rule of thumb I like to use is that solutions to problems should never be more complicated than the original problem – and that’s part of what the UC industry has faced.

For large enterprises and service providers, the process of on-boarding a user can be quite cumbersome. Provisioning a user with a full set of UC services can be a complicated, error-prone process due to the number of systems that need to be set up. UC on-boarding can include voice, presence, conferencing and a number of other applications that fall under the “UC” umbrella. In addition to setting up access to new applications, administrators need to find a way to migrate large numbers of users and massive amounts of data for continuity of dial-plans and other functions.

Last week VOSS, a provider of UC management and provisioning tools (UC-OBT), announced the general availability of its new on-boarding tool kit to make this process simpler and faster. VOSS’ UC-OBT is a suite of tools and applications that provides customers with the services it needs to simply and rapidly connect end users and UC-enabled devices to the wide range of UC collaboration applications.

Back in the 60s, science fiction author Ursula Guin published a novel called “Rocannon’s World” in which a device, called an “Ansible,” would allow users to receive instantaneous or superluminal communications over interstellar distances. With this machine, users can send and receive any kind of message to a similar device over any distance without any delay. Seems like an Ansible would make a great unified communications device!

Well, almost 40 years later, Siemens Enterprise (SEN) announced its own Ansible at the company’s analyst conference last week in Denver. Ansible is the company’s all new, reinvented UC platform that is supposed to be significantly easier to use and leverages WebRTC to make it easy to deploy, as all that’s needed is a browser. Although any kind of public demonstration of Ansible is being kept under wraps, the company described as a new UC platform that can deliver better real-time engagement to increase employee productivity. Ansible will deliver a fully aggregated and integrated experience across social software, business applications, video, voice and analytics to deliver an exceptional user experience.

Last week, Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) held its annual Industry Analyst conference in Annapolis, Maryland. Unified Communications has historically been the primary focus for ALU’s go-to-market strategy, but the company has spent the last few years beefing up its OmniSwitch data networking portfolio as well. In fact, if you recall, ALU was the focal point of this Network World Article where the company beat out Cisco for a network project in its own home state.

Like every other network vendor, ALU has been trying to jump on the market opportunity created by the rise and complexity of server virtualization. I recently did some research that pointed out that a small amount of server virtualization saves both capex and opex. However, highly virtualized environments, meaning those that are more than 50% virtualized, have actually seen operational costs rise by as much as 20%. High amounts of server virtualization create unpredictable traffic flows that can wreak havoc on the network.

This week is the annual Enterprise Connect (formerly VoiceCon) conference in Orlando, FL. One of the many panels I’m on and moderating at the conference is titled “UC? Mobility? FMC? BYOD? SIP Trunking? Video? WebRTC? It’s time to take control.”

The theme of taking control of the UC environment is a good one as it’s my belief that Unified Communications is getting more and more complex as the vendor community expands the definition and functionality of UC.

At one time, telephony was simple: a PBX, a phone and cable. Connect them up and you’ve got voice. Troubleshooting meant checking the phone, cable or PBX. However, that legacy solution was as inflexible as it was simple.